----- ... -- _. t . ' :. }- I Ä f , "j. _'\ D ".' ì ì I'U' : , - c-l S: ( 1 ! - -. tt: ,/ \ I,..." - I c- \ -- '> *'^" '--?' \\' >,- - . 'F 1 \ : . / { l" 'J\ , '. .,;'.4' < ", . lJ (L ' -<( "" " . 1 \- ' (( ' I,; "' . .; F p . '.. J. \ \ ,r- . ." " ' .. . .i ". ., ;\ \ · tt ). " " ) .1.. ';! ,.' . . , : . ' \.J . ----- -"-- . '- - ..... ,' " 28 ....... \ \, .. '. i J I If 1/ '! . THE NEW YORKER, JULY 7, 1997 true of the left in France. A French minister who was asked about his children by a reporter would be offended, but he would be per- fectly affable if he was asked, in discreet code, about the health of his mistress.) Overheard at Brooks's, the club in St. James's, among old Tories and Labourites: a stiff-upper-lip protest about a favorite son's not getting into Oxford, which quickly vanishes in general embarrassment. Among New Labourites, on the other hand, you can talk instantly ,./" about how many changes of under- wear you should pack for a three- year-old going to nursery school for the first time. A conversation with Mark Fisher, the genial new arts minister, winds effortlessly from the question of how to employ the lottery windfall so that it will broaden the base for provincial the- atre to the modalities of keeping a two-year-old away from junk TV. Fisher is open -faced, open- hearted, and-even by American, gee-whiz standards-almost touchingly enthusiastic as he talks about, say, the possibility of really designing, rather than just throwing up, the next generation of government buildings. He has redeco- rated his office with art from what seems to be a government Depot of Bad Paint- Ing, but at least it is sixties painting, called back to the walls from the last time Labour was in power. The old- style Pop- and Op-art optimism over- flows the frames and seems to flood the office. Even the bright-red ministerial boxes that :fill the desk look as shiny and virginal as Christmas presents. The innocent air, though it may be calculated, is not without content, and even cold purpose. Many New Labourites believe that the worst of the old system they have inherited lingers in the Brit- ish obsession with placement-the fear of being in the wrong place, or taken for the wrong type-that, filtering down from the aristocratic manner, remained even after the aristocrats lost the power to impose it. (The French aristocratic manner involves an unembarrassed sense of pleasure; the British involves an un- embarrassed sense of place.) Even more than simple snobbery, what limited Britain was a self-consciousness that in- volves a fear of doing things that are too "And notice, gentlemen, this year's model has twenty per cent more trunk space " over to Camden Town, where Blair's adviser Philip Gould lives, and you never run once through the center of London except for Westminster itself. The Central London borough of Kensington and Chelsea remains the last Tory redoubt. The reprobate Tory Alan Clark was parachuted into the constituency at the last moment, and won easily. Clark's published diaries contain the most beautiful line in mod- ern British political thought. "I only can properly enjoy carol services," he reflects, "if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation." In one way, New Labour manners are a subset of the manners that were first characterized, on the East Coast, as "yuppie." The yuppie style was, basically, that of the first group of Americans who had an upper-class belief in their entitle- ment to pleasure but did not own real estate. In England, more complicatedly, the manners are those of the first group of people who have a sense of absolute entitlement to pleasure but do not own real estate in the country. New Labour, though it includes many intellectuals, is not an intellectual movement. Its pri- mary transformation involves an unem- barrassed attitude toward pleasure. T er- ence Conran's vast Bluebird complex, . . on the King's Road-a kind of mega- Balducci's combining a restaurant, a food hall, a café, a club, and an outdoor market-is to New Labour what the Crystal Palace was to High Victorian- ism. It may be difficult to imagine a New Labourite asphyxiating himself while dressed in women's stockings, as one Tory M.P. did in the last govern- ment, but it is not hard to imagine someone going to debtors' prison after running up a bill in focaccia. The New Labour fanaticism about food goes hand in hand with a fanati- cism about children. New Labour man- ners, like comparable manners in Amer- ica, are almost punitively obsessive about child-rearing. Cooking and child-rear- ing have become the substitute religion of upper-middle-class people of the late twentieth century. (The one love in Bill Clinton's life whose depth and sincerity no one doubts is his love for Chelsea Clinton.) Every group has a code and a set of secret passwords. The entrée to any member of the Blair team is talk about child-rearing This is not to suggest that the apparat of the previ- 0us government were unloving toward their children; rather, this kind of obses- sive caring is a style that they would have found embarrassing. (This is still